There does not appear to be hardware acceleration at all. Those numbers are typical for software decoding.

My GT6600 takes 18Mb/s 1080i mpeg2 that is nearly 100% of one athy64 2Ghz core in software to about 30% with the hardware involved. This with the fairly primitive Linux xvmc Nvidia hardware acceleration.

I have two of the S3H's. One is in my main box, with a 65w x2 4600 and a 1650pro card. Just a surfing box. That board is real solid. Slow booting, but solid as a rock. The other board will go in a friends photoshop box with an x2 4400 and 4 gigs of ddr2 800. She'll actually be using the onboard vid for a while. Building that box now.
Guess I'll go over to gigabytes site and see if there is a new bios update. Latest bios is F2, from may.
I like these full atx boards just in case my vid card blows up. The price is right too.
The onboard ethernet is weak. I added a nice intel card, so maybe that price isn't quite as outstanding as I thought.

The speeds for VC-1 and h264 may make sense with the 690G graphics core, the MPEG2 decoding is definitely too high but it's the slowest speed dual-core they sell so that probably explains it. Here is an intersting if a touch old article from February, so it doesn't include the AMD HD 2k series and is geared toward the video card contribution, but it does show that even with low-end graphics card a decent CPU ought to be able to do it all if not bogged down with other apps. It also looks as if 1080p is what really takes some horsepower. They do use an FX-60 2.6GHz dual-core though so keep that in mind:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/video-playback_9.htm...

I've sold a few of the older 690 Gigabyte Matx boards with XP and Vista and all of my customers are really happy with them.

the DVI is a really nice addition and while some in online forums have mentioned the lack of overclockability.......what the heck did you expect for a sub $100 Matx board that comes with everything including a DVI option?

it's great to hear that the new boards do offer the feature as it may get 1 or 2 ppl in the world who just had to have a 1080p computer on the absolute cheapest budget that could only fit a 3600 AM2 dual core that had to be overclocked to fit the bill for their 1080p needs but personally I don't tell my customers about overclocking and lock the bios's if I suspect they will anyway.

Are Gigabyte abusing themselves again?

Their S-Line GA-MA69GM-S2H only gain overclocking features if its a 3 or higher, i.e. the board would/should be called GA-MA69GM-S3H. I like Gigabyte boards, but avoid the S/S2 line. All of the previous S2 line had no overclocking features (well voltage/multiplier etc.).

If I understand this - the people with the existing 690g boards can do a bios update and get the new features.

Nice job, AMD.

Here is a somewhat trivial question to many of you: what software do I need to use in order to utilize the GPU for 1080p video? MPEG2 has been playable via software for some time, but VC-1 and H.264 aren't fairing well with general software decoders.

Do you need to use Windows Media Player? Or can you use any player as long as the latest ATI drivers are installed?

I hope this will help MSI to update their K9AG Neo2-Digital BIOS with a few more features. Its awful having a chip thats willing to overclock but is stopped by the lack of HT multiplier control. Luckily it can already adjust clock, multiplier, memory, & basic voltages.

Does give or take 200 MHz (pretty much just +/- 10% performance) really mean that much in terms of what kinds of things you can decode? If you can decode 30 fps of H.264 with a 2.4 GHz X2, then shouldn't 2.2 GHz X2 should be able to decode about 27?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...

This 'news' makes me wonder, how fast does a Core 2 Duo need to be to decode 1080p x264 content?

Can someone explain to me why you need such beefy hardware to decode HD streams? I am quite sure my HD-DVD player does not have a 2.4Ghz CPU or 2GB of RAM in it.

It's a shame that Blu-ray playback drives are so dang expensive. The price makes BRD HTPCs impractical to say the least.

I just built two systems based on this board and my brother built one:
BIOSTAR TForce TF7050-M2 with HDMI/HDCP..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138061

Has on board HDMI (with HDCP), VGA, and S-Video out, and comes with a HDMI to DVI adapter, so you have 4 different ways to output video right out of the box.

Also has 4 Dimm slots, and onboard power and reset switches.

It has a Bios tweak or two, and seems to overclock a little bit as well. ;)
(If you consider a Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane 1.9GHz @ 3096Mhz okay)

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/t257764.html

Has a great Bios, with CPU, Ram, and Northbridge voltage adjustments, to name a few things.

By the way, you can overclock the onboard graphics if you feel the need.

Very nice board for the month that I have had it.

Why are mATX boards that have DVI output so hard to find on the Intel side :(

Gigabyte? Not interested, not even slightly, never EVER again.

This is slightly off topic from the 690g, but it's related to HD playback.

I'm curious to see how many others are doing this. I hooked my 2 year old Sempron notebook to the rgb video input of my $767 "Vizio" LCD at 1366x768 res. I connected the audio to my surround sound with a simply mp3 to rca adaptor $3.94 at walmart. Now I go to abc.com and watch full size shows with limited commercials on my big screen. I've only been using it for 2 nights, so I haven't checked out other available content. I really need a wireless mouse, because you have to click "cont." to resume the video after the 2 commerical breaks (have to get up off the couch - that won't work for long.)

What's interesting is at 1366x768, it appears to be high definition. It's clearly better than standard def broadcasts. The second point is all my equipment is low-tech - even my dsl is only 700k down, yet it appears to work just fine.

Finally, the direction has to be towards "TV on demand". If I can make this a permanent setup - I might cancel my $120/mo Directv contract.

I've got what is I guess a first gen 690G and 1080p x264 decodes choppy with a 4600 and free CoreAVC. Put in the retail CoreAVC and no more problems.

This is more about *itty codecs than actual hardware.

If the hardware requirements for HD playback put you off, you may be interested in the second component of AMD's 690G refresh: overclocking. AMD didn't put much effort into 690G overclocking at the chipset's launch, instead opting to focus on overall platform stability. However, the company has been working on its reference BIOS for 690G motherboards, adding voltage adjustments, memory timings, CPU multiplier and HT clock control, and even the ability to manipulate the clock speed of the chipset's integrated graphics core.

Now that's newsworthy. Two thumbs up to AMD for that one.

I ordered the ATX variant (S3H) the other day with a BE-2300 processor. Traded the bundled TV cable in the S2H for BIOS undervolting in the S3H since it's my first AMD build (yeah) and I don't know what to expect in terms of noise and thermals. I chose the Gigabyte over the Asus because it seems it would be easier to upgrade the stock Northbridge cooler on the Gigabyte model (which I do plan to do). Hopefully the hardware fan control works well, but if RPMs turn out to be too high I guess I can offset them with a Zalman Fan Mate controller.

Building an HD capable HTPC wouldn't you be better off with a dirt cheap CPU and a Radeon HD 2400?

You can make MPEG2 video so high resolution that it requires a 1.8GHz dual-core CPU to play it? Or is it just that 1.8GHz is the slowest X2 processor they plan to make (since I can't see that such a thing exists now) but they can't admit that you could do it with a Sempron or Athlon 64?

Weren't people playing back VC-1 before the newest GPUs and CPUs came out? I think H.264 is pretty new and required high-end stuff right from the start but I thought VC-1 was a little older. Certainly old enough that TWO 2.2GHz processor cores seems like overkill.

Yeah, I'd like to see some testing of this board. I'm planning on building a HTPC within the next 6 months, so this is very intriguing. It also strikes me as a rather quiet affirmation that AMD is still thinking of the enthusiast on a budget.

So do you need that mobo to do "driver streamlining"? Or just any AMD X2 will do?

If you do need this mobo, Will TR please do a test with HD playback between 690G 2.4ghz X2 and some other mobo with a 2.4ghz X2? And of course against a 8600/2600 video card.

Thanks.